Mexican politicians turn to bulletproof garb

When it comes to bulletproof clothing, Miguel Caballero has thought of pretty much everything. For years, the Colombian entrepreneur has been producing haute couture Italian leather jackets capable of stopping every bullet from a .22 ripping out of an Uzi submachine gun to a Dirty Harry-style .44 magnum.

He has also designed bulletproof sports jackets, polo shirts, T-shirts. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and former president Álvaro Uribe of Colombia modelled a life-saving guayabera, the loosely fitting Caribbean dress shirt with two pockets at the waist.

But even the self-styled Armani of armour felt that he had to come up with something special when he began to think about the security challenges of this year’s elections in Mexico.

Over the next few months, 10,000 or so high-profile politicians will campaign day after day in public plazas big and small to compete for more than 2,000 posts ranging from municipal mayor to president of the republic.

Except that this time around they will be doing so against a backdrop of unprecedented drugs-related violence: last week, the attorney-general’s office reported that 12,903 people were killed between January and September last year – a leap of 11 per cent compared with the same period in 2010. Altogether, a staggering 47,515 people have died in drug-related violence since Mexicans last elected a president in 2006.

“Mexicans never thought they needed the protection before,” says the Bogotá-born businessman who cut his teeth during the worst years of Colombia’s notoriously bloodthirsty drugs war. “Now, they realise that they do.”

To minimise the risks associated with the campaign trail, Mr Caballero and the company that bears his name have come up with a US$4,000 imitation-leather attaché case that unfolds into a bulletproof shield 80cm wide and the height of a fully grown man.

The idea, says Javier Di Carlo, Miguel Caballero’s marketing manager, is that a politician’s bodyguards use at least two – and as many as four – of the cases together to protect a politician on several flanks in the event that he or she comes under fire. “Remember Gladiator?” asks Mr Di Carlo. “Well, it is based on the Roman defensive formation.”

Mr Caballero told the Financial Times that at least one of Mexico’s presidential candidates has bought “absolutely everything” in the line, including several of the new attaché cases. He also says that other members of all the main political parties planning to compete in July’s election have purchased one or more of his products.

It is not just Mr Caballero whose business has benefited from the increasingly tense climate in Mexico. According to the Mexican Association of Vehicle Bullet-proofers, annual sales have more than doubled over the past decade to 1,500 a year.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, neither the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party nor the conservative National Action Party to which President Felipe Calderón belongs would comment on the security measures that their candidates have taken to head off the threat posed by the country’s well-organised and well-armed drugs cartels.

But Manuel Camacho, a former foreign minister and now a close collaborator of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s left-wing candidate in July’s presidential election, acknowledges the dangers that the forthcoming campaigns pose to the candidates. He has proposed more televised debates to reduce some of the candidates’ appearances in public.

For several years now, the cartels, which earn tens of billions of dollars through everything from trafficking illegal drugs and people into the US to extortion and pirating merchandise back home, have become increasingly well-equipped.

Government seizures show that there has been a steady shift from ordinary .38 calibre weapons towards ever more powerful armament, including AK-47 assault rifles, .50 calibre Barrett rifles designed for use against military equipment, and rocket-propelled grenades.

“Mexico has never experienced an election climate as dangerous as this one,” says Mr Camacho. “The risks are very clear.”